A Conversation with Abu Khattala

This past weekend, U.S. Special Forces captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, one of the suspected ringleaders of an assault on American diplomatic installations in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The attack, a night of chaos and violence, claimed the lives of four Americans: Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; Sean Smith, another diplomat; and Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both security contractors. According to reports, first published by the Washington Post on Tuesday, Abu Khattala was seized in a clandestine raid on the outskirts of Benghazi. It was the first time one of the alleged perpetrators had been apprehended. In a statement, President Obama described Abu Khattala’s apprehension as a moment of justice for the victims.

I have been working as a reporter in Libya for the past six months, and I met with Abu Khattala in April through contacts within Benghazi’s complex web of militias. Abu Khattala was designated a terrorist by the State Department in January. At home, though, in Leithi, a neighborhood in Benghazi where many militant Islamists reside, he did not give the impression that he was a man in hiding. He was waiting on the street outside his house, a multistory, dun-colored building, when I arrived; he looked relaxed and greeted passing neighbors. He is more than six feet tall and barrel-chested, with a shock of gray hair and a long beard. Inside, he sat in a green leatherette chair as we talked.

Abu Khattala is the only person who has been publicly charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission. At least a dozen others have reportedly been indicted in sealed court papers, but their identities are unknown. The three-part criminal complaint against Abu Khattala, filed by a U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, accused him, among other things, of “killing a person in the course of an attack on a federal facility involving use of a firearm,” and providing and conspiring to “provide material support to terrorists resulting in a death.” It is unclear why the manhunt took so long; American officials told the Times that they were waiting for a moment when he could be captured in a way that would minimize casualties.

Abu Khattala has repeatedly denied leading or even taking part in the assault. He has acknowledged that he was outside the U.S. compound when it was besieged; in some interviews, he claimed to have been directing traffic, though what that would mean on a night when men with guns were arriving in various vehicles is hard to say. (In a thorough and exhaustive report, David Kirkpatrick wrote in the Times that numerous people present that night described Abu Khattala as a “central figure in the attack.”) When I asked about the assault, he claimed that he and other militiamen had arrived at the scene after hearing there was a disturbance: “We were trying to bring order.”

Abu Khattala smiled. “There is no case against me,” he said. “But I am not the one who needs to prove my innocence. The Americans must prove their accusation.” Abu Khattala told me that he had received no official confirmation of the indictment, nor had he ever been formally questioned in relation to the attack.

He also maintained that the violence in Benghazi that night grew out of a protest against a movie produced in the United States that lampooned Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, rather than being a planned action by militants. (This has been a much-contested question; Kirkpatrick concluded that “the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests.… The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”) But Abu Khattala was oblique when asked whom, specifically, he believed was responsible for carrying it out.

Abu Khattala said that he was born in 1971, in a quarter of Benghazi known as Birka, and grew up in Leithi, an area long known for its opposition to Muammar Qaddafi’s régime. (“Under Qaddafi, it was forbidden to live our way of life. People were jailed for simply having a beard,” he told me.) Many young men from Leithi have headed overseas in the name of jihad, whether to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties or Americans in Iraq over the past decade. Abu Khattala told me that he was not one of those who had travelled outside Libya but that he frequented the same mosques as fighters who returned home. These associations, he said, landed him in jail for the first time in 1995. He said that he was held for several terms totalling ten years, shuttled between several prisons, including Qaddafi’s most notorious—Abu Salim, in Tripoli.

Several people I spoke with in Benghazi, among them hardline Islamists who knew him in Abu Salim, remember him as a loner. Others recall him as a misfit who did not join any of the militant groups that recruited within the prison. Abu Khattala told me that he was released in 2010 and returned to Leithi and its radical mosques, where serving time in Qaddafi’s jails amounted to a rite of passage. He never finished high school or married. When I met him, he told me that he was earning a living as a contractor on construction projects.

During the 2011 uprising against Qaddafi, Abu Khattala drew from his network of contacts to form an armed rebel group named after Abu Ubaidah bin Jarrah, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions. His group’s fighters were accused of killing General Abdul Fattah Younes, a former Interior Minister who had defected to the rebels but was viewed with suspicion by Islamists. Abu Khattala told me that, after Qaddafi’s fall, the group had stopped operating under the name of Abu Ubaida bin Jarrah, but it still existed as his own network—“It was there before the revolution, and it is there now”—but he refused to give further details or its new name.

Beginning in early 2012, several fighters from Abu Ubaidah bin Jarrah’s ranks joined a militant group called Ansar al-Sharia, which now comprises an armed core of several hundred men with affiliated preaching outfits and charitable organizations. At the top of the street where Abu Khattala lived, a large sign advertised an Ansar al-Sharia event. The State Department has designated Ansar al-Sharia a terrorist organization—accusing it of involvement in the 2012 attack, as well as of ongoing assassinations of security officials in Libya—and has described Abu Khattala as one of its senior leaders. Abu Khattala claimed this, too, was not true. “We have a friendly relationship,” he told me. “I know many important figures in the movement, but I am not one of its leaders.”

Locals say that Abu Khattala has scores, if not hundreds, of youthful followers. “He is the most connected one to the youngsters, and he has been very active in getting more kids to join him,” a graduate student who grew up a few blocks from Abu Khattala’s house told me. “He is charismatic, and that helps him recruit. They believe in him more than any of the other [former revolutionary commanders] who have now associated themselves with a government they consider infidel.” From the perspective of these youths, the graduate student said, “He is the one who still continues the mission and carries the flag. He seems more like the real deal.”

Abu Khattala appeared unperturbed when I asked about his designation as a terrorist by the State Department. “What is terrorism?” he asked me. “Is what the Americans are doing in the world not terrorism? They have made themselves our enemy through their actions. If my enemy classifies me as such, it means nothing to me.” When I spoke to him about his possible capture, he said, “I am living a normal life here. I am not afraid of anything, because I trust in God. This is fate. If God determines you will be here today and gone tomorrow, there is no escape.”

Abu Khattala became animated when he talked about the 2012 attack: “Why didn’t the Americans insure enough protection for the Consulate and their ambassador?”

He claimed that he and others in the city “only discovered how many C.I.A. people were in Benghazi” afterward. ”Why were they here? Who gave them the right to involve themselves here? It is an insult to the Libyan people.”

Abu Khattala expounded on his belief that the West will always be locked in conflict with Islam. “We will never be at peace with the West, because Islam will always prevail,” he argued. And he maintained that one of the biggest problems faced by Libya is foreign interference: “America and other countries are trying to impose their own ideologies and views here,” he said. “They will divide Libya if they continue this.”

He showed no sympathy for Ambassador Stevens, a man who, by all accounts, had come to Libya with a sense of mission, and developed a strong sense of connection to the city he would die in. “I never met this man. He is a person who has been killed just like any Palestinian, any Iraqi, any Syrian,” Abu Khattala said. “Killing happens every day in Benghazi.”

Photograph of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi by Esam Al-Fetori/Reuters.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.